As I grew early on in my 12 Step program I found that I was carrying a heavy load. I had much shame, guilt and fear inside of me. Shame for all my past mistakes, Guilt for exposing my children to my alcoholic behavior, and Fear for what was to come. As I learned that I could turn my will over and stop beating myself up the healing process started. This did not mean it happened over night but as long as I kept working the steps and applying them into my life I worked through those feelings. I think the guilt was the hardest to work through because I knew that my past behavior effected my children and they were only innocent bi standards. I was allowing my children to cross boundaries because it was all my fault and then the shame kicked in. As my spiritual side started to grow I started to realize that I could set healthy boundaries with my family and not worry about hurting their feelings, besides I only wanted them to get better and learn knew ways of dealing with life. We in recovery have to be careful of these feeling because this can allow other’s to not respect us and if we don’t deal with the unhealthy behavior nothing changes.
Fear was the hardest behavior I had to work on because I was so use to running from anything I had to deal with, it was all whelming to me. We have to understand as we grow in recovery we are NOT use to feeling, besides we masked our pain with the drug (alcohol,cocaine,pills). All of those raw feelings crop up on us and we don’t know how to deal with them. During this time we need to make sure that we stay close to other’s in recovery so that we may learn how to deal with all of the new emotions.
As we learn to deal with these feelings and learn to own our own power we can get use to dealing with life in general and the after effects of our emotions dwindle away.
Lets learn to deal with our Shame, Guilt, and Fear today and learn to take car of ourselves.
God Speed my Brothers and Sisters
TBH
turkeyboneheaven 